Kassen, Rees

Contact Information:

Preferred Method
s of Contact:

E-mail, Office Telephone

Research Information:

Research in our lab concerns the most fundamental and persistent puzzle of nature: the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Or, put another way, we are trying to answer the age-old question, why are there so many species in the world? To do this requires that we study the evolutionary process as it unfolds, keeping track of the variety of genotypes and phenotypes in a population or community through time, a task that would be very challenging with any large, long-lived organism. For this reason, we use microbial populations of bacteria and protists to study the evolutionary process in the laboratory. Topics of interest in the laboratory include the relationship between environmental variation and diversity, the genetics of adaptation, evolutionary medicine, and the evolution of social interactions.